My bones know green

As sunlight touches a little more of each day, extending the margins of dusk and dawn, the urge to fix the garden overtakes me, as it does every year. A deficiency in both time and knowledge means this task is always in motion, with more good intentions than can ever be realized. But often this doesn’t matter, it is enough to touch the ground, to see and feel the growth around me. To do what I can.

As I examined what work needed done, Joni Mitchell’s words circled me ‘Just a little green, like the colour when the spring is born’, ‘call her green, and the winter cannot fade her’.

Spring, for me, always feels like a time of ghosts and growth. Emerging from winter, seeing what remains strong and what has not survived the cold.  Green buds on a gnarled honeysuckle, weaving its way through stone wall, offer a promise that it’s story will continue. The snowdrops I planted in hope last year haven’t grown.  I am surprised at the depth of disappointment this evokes.

Memories swim and cajole, a scent or sound reminding me of time, people or places now distant. Unreachable. Recently I have been living in memories as writing my next book has required me to examine and re-trace some of life’s paths.  Facing and questioning some traumas that have travelled with me, unwelcome and unacknowledged companions on my journey.  This has been, perhaps needed to be, a lonely experience. With the retuning light there is a lifting of that weight, as it slowly gets replaced with feelings of emergence and transformation.

In a golden afternoon, my sons and I start to clear the ground for this years planting.  Making space for flowers and shrubs, marvelling that the strawberry plants have somehow, impossibly, survived another winter. Their new leaves reaching to the sun that they couldn’t possibly have felt when this growth started. We are optimistic, but realistic about the unpredictabilitys of island weather and events beyond our control. So we buy packs of wildflower seeds to scatter when the time comes, an action that guarantees something beautiful will emerge.

I have been thinking a lot about what my bones know and the stories I carry and Joni’s words ‘call her green and the winter cannot fade her’ feels like my embodied truth. It is what has always kept me strong, protected me. That I so easily feel the beauty of earth, sea and sky, and that I can call upon this when I need to, and that when I can’t, when I am not strong enough, they come to me.

My bones know green and I will grow.  And this is the gift I hope to give to my children. Sometimes, in my moments of anxious self-doubt I worry this is all I have to give and that it cannot possibly be enough. But it is also everything, it is being present, taking time and giving love, understanding and hope. I show them beauty, the everyday miracles of life. I call them green, and hope and pray that life’s winters will not fade them.